Project 2010 Customer Success and Dynamics SL 2011 Integration

My name is Arpan Shah and I’m the Director of Microsoft Project Product Management at Microsoft. I moved into this role this past June 2010 having led Technical Product Management for the SharePoint team for the SharePoint 2007 and 2010 releases. I’m especially excited to lead the Project Product Management team given the exciting new in-market Project 2010 technologies, the strong partner ecosystem, passionate customer community and fascinating vision! With a customer base that exceeds 20,000,000 Microsoft Project users and over 10,000 organizations that use Microsoft Project Server, it’s definitely a great place to be!

Since launching Project 2010 in May, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of excitement from Project Managers, partners and decision makers. We’ve had an incredible number of downloads of the beta and evaluation software and we’re getting positive feedback from users on new client features like the Ribbon UI, timeline view and SharePoint sync, just to name a few. When it comes to Project Server 2010, enterprises such as Volvo, Amdocs and Marquette University are deploying Project Server 2010 today to manage their IT portfolios, reduce costs, maximize resource allocations and improve workflows. Along with great customers, we have a large skilled Microsoft Project partner community and you can learn more about them at http://www.microsoft.com/project/en/us/solutions-partners.aspx.

What makes the Project 2010 release special is how it enables individuals, teams and organizations to manage all their work, not just projects. It’s a vision we strongly believe in and something we’ll continue investing in the near and longer term. To execute on this vision of providing a holistic set of Project Management technologies, one of our focus areas is to integrate with other key systems such as the Office, SharePoint, SQL BI capabilities, Team Foundation Server and Dynamics. Integration with other technologies helps users seamlessly manage and maintain all their projects across systems.

In fact, just last week, the Dynamics team announced that Microsoft Dynamics SL 2011 will be generally available in March 2011 across North America and will have out-of-the-box integration with Project Server 2010. This will bring together project management and project accounting for mid-sized project-driven organizations through functionality that reduces redundant data entry, provides synchronization of project and accounting information, as well as the creation and viewing of budgeting and net profit information. This release continues a long history of Project and Dynamics integrations beginning with the 2003 release.

So what’s next? Over the next few months, you’ll continue to see innovation coming from Microsoft, our partners and customers. We’d love to hear from you through our blog, forums and at events. In fact, this week, we’re one of the key sponsors for the PMI Global Congress conference in DC. So if you’re here, swing by our booth (#1001), try Project 2010 and tell us about your Project Management experiences! You can also visit http://www.microsoft.com/project and watch videos, download a free trial and get more product information.